Hatter's Revenge (rewriting - read at own risk)

Ch. 28: A Bloody Event

Mad woke with a start to find Tamsus sitting with his back against the door like Rakta had days ago. Uneasily, he wondered how long Tamsus had been there and why he hadn't woken when the door had opened.

"What were you dreaming about?" Tamsus asked, his voice soft and wistful.

Mad sat up, staring at Tamsus. "What?" he asked blankly.

"You were dreaming. What were you dreaming about?" Tamsus' fingers drummed an erratic beat against the stone floor, his eyes skimming over Mad, a restless energy flowing steadily from him.

Mad shook his head, shrugging. If he had been dreaming, he didn't remember what it was. He shifted to where he was leaning against the opposite wall, a weird sense of deja vu sweeping over him. He wasn't scared though. Not this time.

He didn't know why.

"Do you remember the first time we met?" Tamsus asked suddenly, hair falling in his eyes as he tilted his head.

Mad's eyebrows pulled together at the question. He nodded. How could he forget?

He'd been literally thrown into a strange forest with nothing but the clothes on his back only to be found by this person with eyes like bright blood and a certain magnetic charm about him. Tamsus had asked Mad if he knew how to shoot before he'd even asked him his name.

"You weren't afraid of me," Tamsus said, something like wonder on his face. "You were the only one who wasn't afraid."

Tamsus stopped and was quiet for a long time, the silence broken only by the inconsistent, somehow unstable beat of Tam's fingers against the floor. Now Tamsus was looking at him in starts and stops, eyes jumping from Mad to the ceiling to Mad to the side wall. He chewed at his lip, drawing blood just like always.

Abruptly, almost sharply, he said, "That was a novelty Maddy. Something completely and utterly unique in my existence. I hardly knew what to do with you." Tamsus laughed, the sound joyless.

To Mad, the laugh sounded exquisitely painful. Like it should have shredded Tam's throat. Tamsus' eyes flicked up to Mad's, somehow more fractured than ever and he said, "I didn't know how to have someone who wasn't afraid of me."

Softly, like he was speaking to a spooky horse, Mad said, "You never had me Tam."

"You know," Tamsus started with a sort of clinical interest. "You're the only one who would actually say that to me Maddy." He laughed again, though this time it was an actual bubble of amusement. "You were the only one who ever told me no."

"And I seem to remember catching a bullet for it," Mad remarked, feeling like his brains were being scrambled.

There was something almost detached about Tamsus right now. It reminded Mad of the effects of morphine in a way. There was a sort of soft acceptance around Tamsus that just barely masked the raw, bloody mess underneath.

"Now you'll lose your head," Tamsus said wiping absently at his mouth, not wincing when he bumped his cut lip. Looking over at Mad, the movement fluid and disjointed all at once, Tamsus asked gently, "Have you ever thought that maybe it's dangerous to tell me no?"

"I think everything about you is dangerous Tam," Mad responded equally as gentle.

Tam laughed, the sound shattered again. "That's funny. I would have said the same thing about you. It's just..." Tamsus trailed off, staring into a darkened corner of the ceiling. He shook his head like he was trying to clear it and finished, "It's just that I never thought we would be so dangerous to each other Maddy."

Mad didn't know what to say. This was a new side to Tamsus and what Mad saw there was something very broken. And something extremely lonely.

Not that that really changed anything. It just added a new perspective to the Ace.